


Dirty Water

by Naraht



Series: Samanthaverse AU [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Reality, Boston, Gen, Jewish Character, Queer Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Special Agents Samantha Mulder and Dana Scully go to Boston to investigate the reappearance of J. Edgar Hoover's secret files, Samantha discovers more about her family history than she wanted to know. (AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirty Water

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a series of stories set in an alternate universe where Fox Mulder was abducted rather than Samantha. The first story in the series is "Such devoted sisters," but this one stands alone.

"Yeah, down by the river  
Down by the banks of the river Charles (aw, that's what's happenin' baby)  
That's where you'll find me  
Along with lovers, fuggers, and thieves (aw, but they're cool people)  
Well I love that dirty water  
Oh, Boston, you're my home"  
\--The Standells, _Dirty Water_

Over by the window, Sam has already reclined the seat and put on her headphones. Her eyes are closed and she's mouthing along to the music with a little smile playing on her lips.

"Louie Louie." Her favorite song. An FBI agent to the core, Sam has an unerring ear for the allegedly dirty lyrics and an unbending belief that one day she'll crack the code. She keeps threatening to reopen the case file; Scully has never been able to figure out whether or not she's joking.

It's just another flight, another case, another assignment. Only this time there's been a curious lack of information on where exactly they're headed, and what the case is. Scully pokes her partner in the side, just above her fastened seat belt. Sam's eyes flutter open and she pulls the headphones down, spilling the tinny sounds of the Kingsmen into the cabin.

"Sam? We're on the plane now, do you want to tell me why we're going to Boston?"

"Do you know the story of J. Edgar Hoover and his secret files?"

A seeming _non sequitur_, but Scully isn't going to play dumb just in the hopes of pumping information out of Sam. She takes a deep breath.

"When J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director, he kept a collection of very sensitive files, containing information acquired through illicit means, that were never included in the FBI's general files. The 'Official and Confidential' series contained information on the extracurricular proclivities of various public figures. The 'DO NOT FILE' series dealt with break-ins. And the contents of these files formed the basis for much of Hoover's influence. After his death, while many of the files survived, the most sensitive ones were willed to Hoover's assistant--and reputed lover--Clyde Tolson as part of the Hoover estate. They were destroyed by Tolson and by Hoover's secretary Helen Gandy."

For this bravura performance, Scully gets a brief approving nod from her partner. "And since then," Sam prompts, "it's always been rumored that the files weren't in fact destroyed, but were passed on to persons unknown in order to be kept safe."

"Which is an urban myth. Gandy shredded the files over a period of two months. People who say otherwise are motivated less by truth and more by a desire to believe in an arcane secret history of America that's entirely unsupported by the evidence."

"People like me," says Sam.

"Yes, Sam. People like you."

The engines are starting to spool up for takeoff, the background hum in the cabin rising to a loud whine that better covers the sound of their conversation. There is no one sitting next to them, but Sam still looks around and drops her voice before continuing.

"What if I were to tell you that I've been contacted by a gentleman who claims that the files still exist, wants to put them back in the hands of the FBI, and has asked the two of us to negotiate on the Bureau's behalf?"

Scully considers. "I suppose I would ask you whether Assistant Director Walter Skinner, our boss and the man who gives us assignments, had been involved in the disposition of these negotiations."

"And you know very well what I would say," Sam replies, amused.

The two women look at each other. Scully realizes that Sam hasn't lost the government expense forms for airfare and accommodation and rental car; she never had them to start with.

"This is a very sensitive matter," continues Sam. "These files contain information on hundreds of American citizens, and they aren't in the custody of the FBI, or the CIA, the State Department, or any other government agency."

"You're scaring me, Sam."

"For decades, despite all the evidence, Hoover denied that organized crime existed in America. It was always believed that the mob had some sort of hold over him--some information that they were using for blackmail purposes--and it seems that this hold continued after his death. According to my informant, Mr. Tolson willingly handed over the files in exchange for an agreement that the mob would continue to sit on this piece of information."

"The Mafia."

"Yeah. The Mafia."

"Mmm-hmm," says Scully skeptically. "For thirty years. And they got in touch with us... why? Does this even have anything to do with the X-Files?"

"Think about it, Dana. Even if it doesn't, this could be the biggest find of documents in twentieth-century history. The Dillinger file, the Rosenbergs, the JFK assassination, it should all be there for the taking. History as it happened." Scully doesn't have Sam's passion for history, but she nods anyway. "And if it does, if it does... it could change the whole course of our investigation. My source is being cagey, but he's definitely implying that there's material of specific interest to us. To me."

"So basically we're flying up to Boston to meet with the mob, without the knowledge of our superiors, in the hopes that the long-lost Hoover files will shed some light on the government's long-standing coverup of alien presence here on Earth."

"That's about the shape of it."

"Sam, I know that I've told you this before, but you're nuts."

Sam grins. "But I get results."

***

"We're going to have to go straight there once we pick up the car," says Sam, checking her watch for the tenth time since getting off the plane. "Straight there."

Like many pilgrims, they have arrived safely at their destination only to be left stranded on the barren shore of the airport curb, waiting for the shuttle to deliver them to the rental car agency. Courtesy shuttles for the T, for the central hotels, for Hertz and Avis have already been and gone, collecting most of the passengers from their flight and leaving them standing as mute testimony to Samantha Mulder's apparently exclusive relationship with Lariat Rent-A-Car.

It is Scully's place in such situations to stand guard over their two small suitcases. She leans against a pillar by the Lariat sign, arms folded, watching as Sam paces out the length of the curb. Sam has taken off her suit jacket and slung it over her arm, a concession to the humidity which afternoon thunderstorms have not entirely washed out of the air.

"It's right across there, you know," offers Sam, apropos of nothing. "We practically could have walked."

She gestures in the direction of the chain link fence separating them from the runways. Across the harbor, the clapboard houses of East Boston are lit by the lowering sun, flat and bright against a backdrop of dark clouds. "Right across there," she repeats, letting her hand fall.

"It won't take long to drive, then." Scully has become practiced at making mild, banal comments that aim at leaving Sam with no intellectual edge to worry, no argument with which to take issue.

But it never works.

"This is Boston, Dana. You'll want to reconsider that statement once we get on the road." Sam pauses, stiffens, looks over Scully's head at someone. "Oh God. I think I know her. Just pretend you're..."

"Samantha Mulder, is that you?"

The speaker is an elderly woman, impeccably dressed, her greying hair set in a permanent wave and her lips set in a gracious smile.

Sam quickly accepts the inevitable. "Yes, Mrs. Miller, it's me. How nice to see you again."

She dips her head awkwardly, bends down to accept a kiss on one cheek.

"And how lovely to see you, Samantha. It's been so long. Are you in town on... business?"

The woman frames the word with the uneasy politeness of a Boston brahmin who can't help but consider law enforcement as something better left to other classes. Scully, feeling every inch the Irish Catholic Navy brat, studies her shoes. Sam looks just as embarrassed.

"Actually, no. We're just up for the weekend, sightseeing." She gestures towards Scully, an afterthought. "This is my friend, Dana. Dana, this is Mrs. Miller."

"Pleased to meet you," says Scully crisply, extending a hand. Mrs. Miller takes her hand and clasps it with feigned warmth. Scully can feel herself being given a surreptitious once-over and she isn't at all sure that the verdict is positive.

"I'm always happy to meet a friend of Samantha's. I've known her since she was just a little girl, you know. We used to summer in Hyannisport."

Scully nods, unable to think of anything but the Kennedy family, death, family tragedy. It fits somehow. She casts a sidelong glance at her partner and finds her transformed. Sam is still bending forward slightly, her stance awkward, as if adjusting for her unaccustomed height. The gawky schoolgirl in the full-grown woman.

"You'll be visiting your mother while you're up, of course?"

"Of course," echoes Sam, just a little too glibly.

"Remember me to her when you do. Tell her that she raised a beautiful daughter. And I'll be sure to tell Celia that I saw you."

She departs, making her way sedately through the crowd.

"A friend of yours?" asks Scully.

Sam shrugs. "Celia Miller hated me. We used to play together, but only because her mother felt sorry for me. And for my mother, after my father left. I don't think she knew quite what to make of us."

Dana stands very still, feeling the grit of the sidewalk under her shoes and the heat of the sun on her face. In her mind's eye she can see Sam and her mother living alone in a quiet house in Chilmark, an environment utterly alien to the homely bustle of the Scully family. The Mulder women, touched by tragedy, incomplete and enduring. She wonders what people said about them, and then decides that she doesn't want to know.

"I don't think I know what to make of you, Sam," she says finally.

The right answer. Sam smiles and squares her shoulders, shaking off the memories. "That makes three of us. I don't know what to make of me either." She pauses. "Now let's find that shuttle bus and get out to Revere."

***

Sam takes the wheel of their rental car, steering them out of the airport, past its satellite hotels and into a cluttered and dingy landscape of parking lots, gas tanks, warehouses and small houses squatting mournfully amid the urban sprawl. On the right they pass a racecourse that has clearly seen better days.

"Suffolk Downs," says Sam, nodding towards it. "My father used to go there sometimes for the races. With his friends. My mother didn't like it much."

Scully has a very good idea of the sort of 'friends' that Bill Mulder took to the track. She can just see them in the stands, talking over the fate of the country in between fixtures. Boston is hours from the Vineyard, and Scully has never thought of it as Sam's home town, but its every corner seems to be filled with Mulder family ghosts.

Feeling as if she ought to respond somehow, Scully casts around for an innocuous reply. "My father used to win money at poker sometimes."

"Oh, I don't think he bet. Not much, anyway." Her voice is tight, rough, controlled. "Didn't have the time to devote to it. I think he met people there. What better place to go for the day, set up a covert meeting, get lost in the crowd? He would have these business trips to Boston, be gone for days at a time, never tell my mother where he was staying. What better place? He was never at home."

Her voice nearly breaks. She swallows hard and slams on the brakes, bringing the car to a stop only a few inches from the SUV in front of them. Red light. Boston driver to the core, Sam raises an unconcerned hand in response to the other driver's indignant gestures.

"Sam, I..."

"And here I am," she continues bitterly, "thirty years later, still meeting 'friends' in Boston. I hope it was worth it to him. I hope he rots in hell."

In Scully's ears is the roar of traffic. This place to which Sam has brought them is a wasteland, filled with blasted asphalt, broken windows, forsaken buildings. It's after seven now, and the sun is sinking, low and blood-red. In the shadow cast by a warehouse, Scully shivers.

Ahead of them, the line of cars is beginning to move again. Sam slams the car into gear once more.

"It's a left here, I think," she says, holding her voice steady and casual with sheer force of will. "Dana, can you get out the directions and check? They're in the glove compartment."

Obediently, Scully bends forward and searches through the maps and brochures provided by the rental agency. Well aware that she's being diverted from the issue, and willing to allow Sam to do it. The directions written down by Sam are tucked inside a map of greater Boston, but Scully makes no move to open them. Her eye lingers on the brightly printed brochures. The Boston Museum of Science. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Suffolk Downs.

Scully bites her lip and carefully closes the glove compartment again, leaving the directions inside. Sam's driving is slowing as she navigates through a maze of back streets, but she is as unerring as a compass needle. Her memory stands her well--sometimes, Scully thinks, too well. She knows the way.

***

Their destination is Ferrario's Reception Hall and Catering, a squat and windowless building standing in a nearly deserted parking lot. Inside, it is a big, dimly lit, anonymous restaurant, the sort of place that caters to cut-price wedding dinners and busloads of vacationing retirees. Just the sort of business that makes an excellent front for the mob. It's 8.30pm on a Friday night and the place is empty of diners, which can't be a coincidence.

Sam has preceded Scully into the building. When Scully enters, she finds Sam being kissed on both cheeks by a short, powerfully built man in a linen suit. His two similarly-dressed compatriots stand nearby, keeping an eye on the door. Leggy Sam, in her heels, is taller than all three of them.

Straightening up, Sam extends a beckoning hand towards her partner. "Dana, this is Carlo Ferrario and his associates Paolo Gamba and Tony Fusco. Mr. Ferrario, this is my partner Dana Scully."

Ferrario advances. "Miss Scully," he says. Just as she's trying to reconcile herself to the idea of being kissed on both cheeks by a Boston mobster, he takes her hand and kisses that instead. "As I was saying to Miss Mulder, we usually entertain better than this, but we thought we'd get the business out of the way somewhere quiet. The kitchen staff are all here, they can cook you whatever you want, and they're not going to pass anything on. You all right with that? After we're done with business, we'll take you lovely ladies out on the town."

"I'm, uh, I'm sure that won't be necessary," says Scully. "This looks like an excellent place to do business."

Whatever else you may say about the mob, thinks Scully, they sure do make a good veal parmesan. Nothing of any interest is said over the entrees. After dinner, a young man comes to bring them coffee, looking remarkably nervous just to be in the room. Sam lifts her cup and looks over it at Ferrario.

"So," she says. "We're ready for the details."

Ferrario leans forward in his chair. "Well, Miss Mulder, the way we see it is this. We took custody of the files when a lot of people wanted them eliminated, and we kept them safe. That's gotta count for something. We feel like we've held them in trust for the nation, like maybe now people are ready to see what they have to say."

"And that now, twenty-five years after Hoover died, most of the people you could blackmail with those files are either dead or out on the golf course somewhere."

"Well, times change." Ferrario holds up his big hands as if to draw a line under this comment. "Doesn't make them any less interesting to you, does it?"

"Maybe not," says Sam, leaning back a little and taking a sip of coffee. "How much material are we talking about here?"

"Twenty-one boxes. All of the man's Personal and Confidential files, straight from his, uh, assistant. Tolson. Couldn't keep an eye on them himself anymore. Everything's right where he left it."

"And that includes material that you think would be of interest to us?"

"You got it."

"Excuse me, Mr. Ferrarrio." Scully leans forward, interrupting the cozy dynamic between Sam and the senior mobster. The other two men look at her disapprovingly. "Going over what I know of the subject, I don't believe that Hoover spent all that much time considering the prospect of alien invasion. Unless those aliens were also Communists. So forgive me if I'm missing something, but I don't see the connection with our work in the X-Files."

"Miss Scully, we called Miss Mulder because you can give us something we need. Deniability. Anyone in the Justice Department gets wind of this deal, your boss can cut you two loose, tell them that you're just two crazy broads who go out chasing aliens. 'Nothing to do with us, Miss Reno.' And that's what we want. Deniability."

Scully nods. Sam shoots her a small, apologetic look.

"And there's all the stuff on her father in there," adds Ferrario. "Got to be interested in that. I like to negotiate with someone who's got a personal investment, you know what I mean? Makes things easier."

There is a long silence.

"We're going to need to see the files before we talk about any deal," says Sam. "Before we even talk about whether there's a deal to be made."

"They're being dropped in your motel room now. You get back from dinner, you'll have till six a.m. to look through them, see that everything's there. Then they disappear again. The timeline's not negotiable."

"No," Sam says, sounding stunned. "No, we won't need to negotiate that."

Up until this point, Scully realizes, the files have been completely hypothetical to Sam. She's talked as if they existed, behaved as if they existed, but only now can she actually perceive them as a reality. And now Scully can see her grappling with that reality. She's blinking rapidly, like she almost wishes it had all turned out to be a fraud. Scully wonders what it is she expects to find, and what it is she doesn't want to see.

***

It's after midnight when they finally make it back to their motel room, a warm and balmy night that neither of them is going to be able to enjoy. Sam kicks off her pumps and moves immediately to close the blinds, even though there's nothing outside but the moths circling endlessly under the porch light. Scully just stands and stares at the cardboard boxes stacked neatly against the opposite wall. They're heavy, plain, sturdy, smudged by dust and a little bit battered by time. In every respect the same as the thousands of old evidence boxes that Scully has seen lining the shelves of the FBI archives.

"Twenty-one," she says, finishing her inventory.

Sam turns to look at the boxes and puts her hands on her hips. "Well, at least they can count."

"What I really want to know is whether they can provide a conveniently located index file."

"Dana, it's the mob, not the National Archives."

Scully sighs. She checks her watch. "We have six hours. Twenty-one boxes. At fifteen minutes per box, that's..."

"Not nearly enough time," says Sam.

But, undeterred, she is already kneeling on the floor and taking the lid off of the first box.

***

Four hours later, Scully's learned more than she ever wanted to know about the sexual proclivities of various Congressmen, but she hasn't found anything remotely connected to the X-Files. Not even anything on the Kennedy assassination. A file on Senator Matheson, set aside for further examination, reveals nothing more than an uninspiring taste in prostitutes.

Sam has gotten out of her suit and into one of the long T-shirts that she wears to bed. She's lying on her stomach on one of the double beds, turning through the pages of a file with monotonous regularity and frowning at each page in turn. Probably memorizing them all for future reference.

But Scully is hitting the wall and the wall is hitting back. She blinks, staring at the slowly drifting wallpaper and feeling like she's got tiny grains of sand under her eyelids. Hours of staring at bad telexes and mimeographs, sorting through dog-eared documents, spotted with age and disintegrating along the folds. Her hands feel grey with the dust of old papers. She's getting too old for this.

Another box, another file. Pick up, open, stare. And stare again. Scully flips quickly through the contents of the thick file: security clearance, surveillance reports, wiretap transcripts, all in place like a hundred other files. But while the file isn't labeled, the name typed at the top of every page is the same. _William Mulder_.

"Sam," says Scully quietly, "um..."

Sam unfolds herself gracefully from the bed and comes over to look. After one glance at the file she kneels down beside the chair. Scully isn't letting the file out of her hands; she knows that Sam isn't nearly as good at sharing.

"It starts before I was born. Before Fox was born..."

In fact it goes back to 1948, a hand-typed personnel file from Bill Mulder's first job at the State Department. Heads together, Scully and Sam read slowly, page by page, with Scully carefully removing ancient paperclips from rumpled sheets of onionskin and leaving behind rusty watermarks, the ghosts of paperclips gone. It looks as if most of these documents haven't been touched since they were deposited into the file. Beside her, Scully can feel Sam trembling almost imperceptibly, deep in her bones. It's muscle fatigue from kneeling on the floor in that unnatural position, and it's something else entirely.

Interviews with the Mulders' Vineyard neighbors in the late 50s, painting the picture of a pleasant, unremarkable, correct and rather distant young couple.

A background check on Christina "Teena" Mulder, nee Kuipers, born in Schipol, Holland in 1931 and naturalized as an American citizen in 1939. Her parents Isaac Kuipers, a goldsmith, and Anne Mendelsohn. Both dead in Auschwitz. Raised by her uncle and aunt. Degree from Wellesley College in English literature...

"She never talked about it," breathes Sam, brushing the page with one fingertip as if it might crumble away under her touch. "I hardly knew..."

The conclusion says nothing about Auschwitz, nothing about Christina Kuipers' religion, nothing about miraculous survival or the inhumanity of man to man. It is simple, perfunctory, and chilling in its implication. "There is nothing in the background of William or Teena Mulder that would prejudice his employment in the project." The words that cursed the Mulder family, printed in smudged black-and-white. For a moment Scully stares at them, embossing them onto her brain.

Steadily, pitilessly, she goes on turning the pages, not allowing herself to linger. In 1959 the Mulder family's phone in Chilmark began to be tapped. The transcripts are few, clearly culled from a much larger initial collection. Bill Mulder and a colleague plan a trip to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. August 1959. Bill Mulder and his brother talk politics, discussing the situation in Indochina and Cuba. December 1961. Teena Mulder and Elizabeth Miller discuss the Kennedy assassination, voicing the sentiments of thousands of other American women. "I could never have been as brave as Jackie..." November 1963. And then a conversation between Teena Mulder and an "unknown man". January 1965.

Scrawled in fountain pen in the margin is the name "C.G.B. Spender."

Sam stiffens. Scully turns to look at her and watches her eyes flickering down the page, jumping past the smudged and clotted words faster than Scully can follow.

_Teena Mulder: Hello?_

_Unknown man: Hello, Teena._

_Teena Mulder: Charles. Bill is just outside shoveling the front walk. If you'll hold on for a moment I'll go and call him--_

_Unknown man: It's you I want to talk to. (pause) It's been too long._

_Teena Mulder: Well, we--we did intend to entertain more, you know, but Bill has been so busy with his new job, and then we spent Christmas with his family in New York State..._

_Unknown man: You know what I mean, Teena._

_Teena Mulder: It's a new year, Charles. Maybe it's time that we--that we moved on--_

_Unknown man: Some things never change._

The typewritten lines are widely spaced. Scully reaches out to turn the page, beckoned on by the dead voices of forty years ago. She is stopped by Sam's hand, resting firm and certain on her own.

"No," says Sam. "I can't. Not yet."

In one abrupt motion she gets to her feet. Going to her overnight bag, she begins to root through it, pulling out items of clothing and throwing them onto the bed.

"I need some fresh air," she says, roughly pulling on a pair of jeans. "I'm going for a walk."

Scully doesn't have to ask; she just follows. Letting the room's screen door slam shut behind her, she trails Sam across the parking lot and across the main road that separates the motel from Revere Beach. At five a.m., the road is almost empty and Scully thanks heaven for it, because Sam wasn't looking where she was going and Scully isn't either.

Down the concrete steps to the beach, and it becomes very clear: Sam doesn't want to walk, she wants to run. With Scully's first step onto the dimly-seen sand, her foot sinks in deeply, clutched as if by bone-dry quicksand. It is soft and treacherous, and it slows her pursuit. Only a few paces in front of Scully at the top of the steps, Sam has drawn ahead. Scully breaks into a half-jog in order to keep up.

Her footing uncertain, Scully struggles on, sucking the cool, damp air into her lungs. Earlier in the night the roar of traffic along the seaside strip was relentless. Now, close to dawn, the only sound is the distant sussurrant rumble of breakers on the shore. It is low tide. The sky above is dark and the line of the sea almost invisible; the only point of demarcation in the universe is the horizon, where a streak of ominous, angry red proclaims the coming of dawn.

Ahead, Sam has melted into the shadowy grey of the beach. Scully continues her pursuit blindly, until all of a sudden Sam is in front of her, dead still. The collision is unavoidable. When Scully stumbles, Sam catches her, steadying and quieting her partner with an outstretched arm. She draws Scully closer, ensuring that she won't continue, then gestures ahead.

Against the featureless beach, the ember of a single cigarette glows, almost the same color as the coming dawn. For a moment Scully just stares, still held against Sam's side, her heart pounding in her chest. She knows very well who it is.

"You know," he says conversationally, "we've been waiting thirty-five years for those files to resurface. Mistakes were made after Hoover's death. They slipped through our fingers; quite a few heads rolled over that one." He pauses. "So good to see you again, Samantha. And your friend as well."

"Mr. Spender," says Samantha flatly, disbelief and resignation mixed in her tone. "I guess I should have expected to find you here."

He steps forward, his cigarette faintly illuminating the lines of his face, and nods politely to Scully. But all of his attention is focused on Samantha, as poised as a cobra waiting to strike.

"It's been some years since I've been in Revere," he continues. "It brings back old memories."

"Unpleasant ones, I'm sure."

"You sound just like your mother," he says, sounding almost charmed. "She never did like to remember the past." He pauses, takes a deeper breath. "There's nothing about your brother in those files, you realize. Just some old family matters that are best passed over in silence. We both know that nothing can be gained by delving further into these things; perhaps we can rest on that shared understanding."

But Samantha is not giving an inch, whether of understanding or anything else. She takes a half step forward, her hand still on Scully's shoulder, interposing herself between them.

"I've read the files," she says. "I know what's in them."

"Ah. Well." He seems momentarily discomfited, perhaps trying to judge exactly how much it is that she knows. "Then you know that it's better to keep these things within the family."

Scully can feel Sam's whole body tensing. "You're not family."

He inclines his head in her direction. It is a courtly as you wish, a declaration that he feels no need whatsoever to argue the fact with her. It is just as provocative as anything he could have said. Samantha is incandescent with rage. Without saying anything, it flows off of her like waves of radiant heat, invisible except to those who can feel. She is burning like a star.

"Perhaps it would be more productive to concentrate on the effect that any awkward revelation would have on your mother at this stage of her life. You do care about your mother, don't you? You should. She's the reason that you're standing here today, you realize. She pleaded with me on your behalf, and her argument was a very persuasive one." He pauses. "Needless to say, I care about her too. I know that her health has been fragile recently; it wouldn't do to upset her."

Sam's hand clenches tighter, her nails biting into Scully's collarbone. Scully doesn't move. "My mother is in perfect health."

"My mistake. I apologize. Still..."

"Whatever you do to my mother," says Samantha Mulder, enunciating every word with icy clarity, "is between you and her, and it will be no more than she deserves."

Silence. The sound of waves dashing themselves against the shore, pitiless.

"What do you want from us?" says Scully, the words breaking from her throat unbidden. "What do you want? If you hoped we'd come to some agreement, this is no way to forge one."

He laughs thinly. "If I'd wanted to deal for the files I would have done so directly and not through an intermediary. The files are useless, I assure you, to me as well as to yourselves. The Mafia would hardly have disposed of them otherwise."

"Then--"

"Then you see that I'm here primarily for other purposes. To have a few words with the daughter of one of my oldest friends, for one." The falseness of the statement is written on his face, in his tone as he relishes its taste on his tongue, knowing that it will never be believed. "A chance to speak with her about the direction that she's chosen. To warn her about the dangers that lie in her path. But as it is--"

He glances back towards the road, towards their motel.

"I believe our discussion here is done. You may have other things to attend to."

Over the sea wall, a dull glow is rising, echoed against the low clouds above. The light of fire.

"Oh god," breathes Sam. "Oh god."

Without another word, she turns and runs.

Spender takes a long, heavy drag on his cigarette, flaring its tip into ashes, and then drops it into the sand only half consumed. He raises his eyes and examines Scully for a moment, as if surprised to find her still there.

"You'll want to go with your friend," he says simply.

"My partner," says Scully coldly, and turns her back on him.

***

Coming from across the road, she can see Sam's silhouette against the flames, standing just a little apart from the spectators who have gathered in the parking lot. The firefighters have arrived already, but, like Sam and like Scully, they are too late. The blaze has already engulfed the motel, spreading with indiscriminate hunger from an epicenter that is only too easily guessed.

Scully crosses the road more carefully this time. To hurry would do no good now. She thinks of all the files lying in their boxes, scorched to ash and soaked in water. All the truths that will now never be unearthed. In a sense she is just as glad.

She joins Sam, stands beside her, and receives no acknowledgment of her presence.

With a crack and a flare of sparks, the roof of the motel falls in. The firefighters start to usher people further away, moving the perimeter back. But Sam just stands there, hands in her pockets, unmoving.

"I was born ten months after that conversation," she says.

***

"When shall I be dead and rid  
Of the wrong my father did?  
How long, how long, till spade and hearse  
Put to sleep my mother's curse?"

\--Thomas Hardy


End file.
